A more traditional Trojan

You undoubtedly know that the security term "Trojan" originates from the story of the Trojan war, where a giant wooden horse was supposedly built and rolled inside a city's protective gates after a lot of soldiers crawled inside the horse.

So what's to stop someone from creating a more traditional type of Trojan that exploits the growing trend of installing Wifi networks everywhere?

Dror Shalev, security expert at Check Point's SmartDefense Research Center, recently did exactly that. As a proof of concept Shalev took a toaster oven and inserted a computer platform inside it. That might sound laughable. In fact I did find it very funny. But in reality there's a not-so-laughable side.

His "Crazy Toaster" goes into action soon after it is plugged in. Software running on the toaster connects to a Windows network and sends an exploit to vulnerable systems on that same network.

Meanwhile no one realizes that the device that cooks their Poptarts is evil. Shalev's demonstration, which was presented at Defcon, is meant to show that "as home networking becomes more ubiquitous, the scope of this problem becomes worse."